“Oh, uh, uh, uh,” he babbled. “Heh, heh, no reason to mention it to her, Joe.”
“Why do I not believe you?”
Before he could answer, Nagatha interrupted. “Joseph, I am sorry for Skippy wasting your time. I castigated him because he promised to convey my gratitude, but instead he didn’t say anything to you about it.”
My brain processed the word ‘castigated’, and I had a vague impression that it meant something bad, but I couldn’t say anything without looking stupid. “Can we skip the blame game, and tell me what you are grateful for?” Getting into the middle of an argument between AIs is never a good idea.
“Why, you saved the ship again, dear,” she was surprised. “You saved me.”
“I did?”
“Yes, Joseph. You insisted that Skippy investigate whether the Valkyrie’s AI could have infected my systems. If you had not done that, the Flying Dutchman would likely have exploded.”
“Oh, really?” It was my turn to be outraged at the beer can. My outrage would have been stronger, except it was hard to be surprised when Skippy did some sneaky shit. “Skippy, you didn’t think it was important to tell me about this?”
“Well, heh heh, you are very busy, Joe. Doing commander things. I didn’t want to take up your time with minor details.”
“We only have two ships. Half of our fleet exploding is not a minor detail.”
“It did not explode, and it won’t explode,” he tried to weasel out of his screw-up. “Probably. It may be good to put some distance between us and the Dutchman, until we can fix the problem.”
“What is the problem, please?”
“Valkyrie’s AI infected the Dutchman,” he mumbled under his breath.
“It did,” Nagatha said with way more glee than the circumstance allowed. “He told you that was impossible, because he has locked down all communication channels from your ship.”
Silently, I shook a fist at the ceiling, knowing Skippy was watching. “He did say that. Gosh, was he,” I clapped my hands to both sides of my face in mock horror. “Wrong?”
Nagatha giggled gleefully. “He was very much wrong. I discovered, after Skippy assured me it was impossible, that Valkyrie’s AI had infected a minor, backup maintenance subsystem of the jump drive capacitor buffer. The AI got around Skippy’s lockdown of external communications by transmitting the virus through your ship’s sensor field. That was frightfully clever. Where Valkyrie’s sensor field overlapped the Dutchman’s field, the virus caused a fluctuation in the sensor data, which I could not explain. I thought it was merely a malfunctioning sensor processor, so I assigned a subroutine to examine the problem.”
“And that,” Skippy broke in. “Created a vulnerability that allowed the virus to infect the Flying Dutchman. That was your fault, Nagatha,” he sniffed.
“Hey!” Waving my arms whether they were watching Valkyrie’s internal cameras or not, I barked at both of them. “You two stop this arguing right now, that’s an order. Bad shit happened. Bad shit happens all the freakin’ time out here. The only thing I can guarantee is, bad shit will happen again. What matters is, did you both learn something?”
Neither of them answered right away, a sure sign they were shouting at each other in magical AI time. Skippy responded first. “Huh,” he sighed. “I learned that damned native AI is sneaky and smart. Even though is it not self-aware, the damned thing is remarkably clever. I underestimated it. One thing I can guarantee is, that will not happen again.”
“I also learned a lesson,” Nagatha sounded weary from arguing. “There are no minor problems out here. Never again will I assign a subroutine to analyze a problem I cannot explain.”
“Ok, so,” I was eager to get to the bridge so I could sit down. A lack of sleep, and shock from being strangled by an alien bedsheet, had me swaying on my feet. “We all learned something, so there is one less bad thing that could happen in the future, and uh,” I yawned. “It’s all good. No harm done, right?”
“No harm, dear,” Nagatha answered gently. “Except that I cannot engage the jump drive until I have purged the virus from the buffers, and any other places that fragments of the virus might be hiding. It is a frightfully devious little creation, a self-assembling weapon. If the Flying Dutchman had jumped, the ship would have gone ‘Boom’.”
Our fleet of two starships was drifting in deep interstellar space, so there was no rush to go anywhere. Except that we always had to expect the unexpected. “How long until you have erased the virus?”
“Skippy is assisting me,” she admitted. “He has much more experience dealing with viruses of this sophistication.”
“That is true,” Skippy bragged. “In some ways, this virus reminds me of the worm that attacked me. For a weapon developed by the Maxolhx, it is very impressive. Anywho, we will have it removed from the Dutchman within an hour. Probably. I can’t make any guarantees.”
“Great. Thanks, the two of you.” I paused with one hand on the doorway to the bridge. My hesitation was caused by a horrible though that just struck me. “Skippy, that virus infected the Dutchman through overlapping sensor fields?”
“Yes. I did not even know that was possible,” he admitted. There was more than a little admiration in his voice. “It was possible only because we were receiving a sensor feed from Nagatha, so the AI knew the Dutchman’s sensor field settings in real-time. That feed has now been terminated.”
“Uh huh. My question is, it is possible for the native AI to transmit a similar virus inside this ship, using the structural integrity fields or something like that?”
“Whaaaat?” Skippy laughed. “No way, dude. Seriously? You think- Oh shit. OH SHIT! Damn it! That AI has infected four missile warheads, and was working toward exploding them. And, um, hmmm, the integrity field of one reactor has been compromised. Hey, um, heh heh, best to take all the reactors and weapons offline as a precaution, hmm?”
My night kind of went downhill from there.
“Hey, Joe,” Skippy called me after I finished a duty shift on the bridge, during which I had almost nothing to do. All reactors aboard both ships were shut down. Jump drive capacitors were drained. Weapons were manually safed. People aboard the Flying Dutchman had extracted the triggers from the self-destruct nukes, despite Skippy and Nagatha assuring me those systems could not be hacked remotely. Probably could not be hacked remotely. It was the ‘probably’ that had me acting paranoid.
“What’s up, Skippy?” I mumbled through a yawn.
“Could you come to Medical? Lieutenant Colonel Smythe is awake.”
“Wow.” Suddenly I was not so tired. “That is great news!”
“Ah, not so great. Smythe is an outstanding special operations leader. He is also a terrible hospital patient. What he lacks, hee hee,” Skippy chuckled at his own joke. “Is patience, get it?”
“So glad you explained that joke to me.”
“Oh shut up. Will you help, or not?”
“I am certainly going to talk with Smythe, if that is good for him. He just woke up?”
“I began the process of awakening him about four hours ago, when I determined he was well enough to move on to the next step in his recovery. It would be good for him to talk with people. Major Kapoor is with Smythe now. I warned both of them not to talk about work.”
“Ha,” I snorted. “How did that go?”
“Not well,” he mumbled.
“Ok, I’ll go there now,” I turned around in the passageway, then had to think for a moment which was the quickest way to the ship’s medical facility. Valkyrie was a big ship, and still unfamiliar. Because I visited the Dutchman as often as was practical, I had to mentally switch the map in my mind to the ship I was aboard. “Hey, uh. Any news about Adams?”
“No, Joe.” He carefully kept his tone neutral. “You asked me not to give you details, or to say whether I am optimistic or-”
“Yeah. Ok. You’re doing the best you can.” Mad Doctor Skippy had Adams in a medically-induced coma, and after the first
day, I had not asked how she was doing. If Margaret Adams was awake, she would want me to focus on my job and not mope around worrying about one member of the crew. So, that is what I was doing. Or trying to do. It is not easy to deliberately not think about something, you know?
When I got near the main entrance to the medical complex, which was buried deep within the ship’s primary hull, I could hear two people shouting. There were three people talking, but one was the calm voice of Major Kapoor, barely audible. He was playing peacemaker or at least trying to get the other two calmed down. I picked up my pace. One of the shouters had a British accent, so it was easy to guess who that was.
“At ease, Lieutenant Colonel,” I said as I strode through the airlock, which had both doors open.
“Sir,” Smythe struggled to rise to some semblance of being upright in the bed, something that wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t actually in a bed, he was resting in a tub, floating on a thick blue-greenish gel that supported his body. His thrashing around wasn’t accomplishing anything, other than making the gel fight his attempts to move.
“Hold still, dammit,” Skippy’s voice came from a speaker on the bulkhead. My guess was he didn’t use the avatar to avoid further irritating Smythe. Man, speaking of irritated, Skippy was super frustrated. Not pissed off, not disgusted. Just feeling powerless and upset. “Joe, make him stop moving!”
First, I tried the Good Cop approach. “Smythe, you heard the doctor.”
“If we had a real bloody doctor,” Smythe began.
Being Good Cop clearly had not worked. I leaned over his bed, gripping the sides of the tub. “That is a direct order, Smythe. Stand down, now.”
His body slumped. The glare on his face did not relax one bit. “Yes, Sir.”
Smythe’s condition worried me. To put it delicately, he looked like shit. His face was gaunt so his cheekbones stood out, and not in a good way. The bones of his one visible hand also were sharply outlined. He had lost a lot of weight and muscle tone. Most of his body was covered in a squishy material that looked like thick gauze soaked in honey. The gauze wrapped around one of his ears and covered the back of his head. What I could see of his skin was pasty and yellowish, and there was a dull film over his eyes, which darted back and forth like they couldn’t focus. The man had been through hell and barely survived, I reminded myself. The skin tone and film on his eyes might be due to medical treatment. He could regain muscle tone, and would do that with the determination that had made him a Special Air Services soldier, before he signed up for the Merry Band of Pirates. If Skippy had seen fit to revive Smythe, I had to trust our former STAR team leader was growing healthier, and would recover as best as Maxolhx medical technology would allow.
“Colonel,” Kapoor caught my eye, and inclined his head toward the airlock.
“I’ve got this, Major,” I assured him, and was rewarded by a look of relief washing across his face. “Carry on.”
“I’ll be back to discuss the training schedule,” Kapoor told Smythe, before walking out the doorway just a bit faster than was strictly necessary or polite. If he had been acting as referee between Smythe and Skippy, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get away. Technically, with Smythe medically unfit for duty, Kapoor was in full command of the STAR team and was not subject to Smythe’s authority. In reality, they both knew Smythe would return to partial duty as quickly as he could. Smythe’s mere presence aboard Valkyrie would make it difficult for Kapoor to get the STAR team to fully buy into his leadership.
Not that it mattered. What remained of our STAR team was too small and weak to accomplish much, and I had no mission in mind for them anyway.
“What is the problem here?” I addressed the question to Smythe. Before he could respond, I added “I won’t bother bringing you up to speed on our status.” He would have already demanded a sitrep as soon as he was awake and could speak.
“The problem, Sir, is my bloody doctor will not listen to what the patient wishes. This is still my body.” With his left hand, he gestured down to his shattered legs. His right arm was immobilized in a heavy cast with tubes and wires sticking out of it.
“Skippy?” I wanted both sides of the story. “Stick to the facts, please,” I cautioned Skippy, while looking at Smythe to let him know my words applied to him also.
“The patient-”
“The patient has a name,” I interrupted. “And a rank, which he has earned.”
“Fine,” Skippy huffed. “Lieutenant Colonel Smythe has just been awakened from deep sedation, which was necessary to heal his extensive internal injuries. He risks reinjuring-”
“Skippy wants to grow my legs back,” Smythe said.
“Uh,” I could not understand why that would be a problem. The Merry Band of Pirates had been regrowing limbs since we took the Flying Dutchman and gained access to miraculous Thuranin medical technology. The Kristang and Ruhar had similar technology, in fact the hamsters had considered regrowing limbs to be a basic medical capability that wasn’t in any way remarkable. Our problem, before we captured Valkyrie, was a severe lack of proper medical nanomachines. When we took the Dutchman to Earth the first time, one of the technologies most in demand was Thuranin medicine, as modified by Skippy for human biology. To the great disappointment of many people, UNEF had decided to keep most of our medical nano aboard the Dutchman for our use, with only small samples left behind on Earth for study.
Even before the one-sided space battle we were now calling Armageddon, Skippy had been unable to fully heal injured members of the STAR team, due to our severely limited supplies of medical nano. Katie Frey and several others were alive because they had been on the injured list, when most of the STAR team raided a Maxolhx space station to obtain power boosters. The injured people had either not suited up for the raid, or remained aboard our ships as reserves.
After Armageddon, though we had access to the extremely advanced medical tech of the Maxolhx, Skippy had been unable to use it immediately, because he had to extensively modify the equipment for human biology. We had lost people who survived the attack, because Skippy had not been able to do as much for them as he wanted to. Margaret Adams was in a coma, and might have permanent brain damage if she survived, partly because of the delay in getting nano treatment for her.
Now, we had enough Maxolhx medical nanomachines to treat thousands of humans. Yet Smythe was refusing to utilize a technology that many people on Earth desperately wanted? That got me pissed off.
Reminding myself that I did not know the full story, I simply asked “Explain, please. You do not want your legs regrown?”
Smythe must have seen the outraged expression on my face. “Not now, Sir. Not now. I can grow my bloody legs back later, after the mission is completed. Skippy tells me that fully regrowing my legs, learning how to use them, and restoring a proper level of fitness, will take five months. I can’t sit on the sidelines for five months. Colonel, Kapoor informed me how thin we are on personnel, with no access to Earth for replacements.”
Damn. It was a good thing I had not barked at him. Lesson learned, I told myself. “We don’t currently have a mission planned for ST-Alpha,” I told him. Then I added “The Universe may have a different idea for us. I would hate for you to be on the sidelines for five months, but,” I looked meaningfully to where his legs ended, encased in extra-thick gel. “You can’t use a mech suit without legs.” Unless access to Maxolhx tech had given us a capability that Skippy hadn’t told me about.
“No, Sir, I can’t. What can happen is Skippy could fashion a set of mechanical legs for me to use, now. I can regrow my own legs later, when I am taking a holiday on Earth.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” I said quietly.
“Sir? Skippy has acknowledged the technology is avail-”
“Not that, Smythe,” I smiled down at him. “I can’t believe you would take a holiday.”
“Oh.” He laughed, and that threw him into a coughing fit. That was good, actually. It would remind him that, to
ugh as he was on the outside, his special operations insides were just a vulnerable and squishy as any human.
“Skippy?” I asked.
“It is true,” he admitted wearily. “I can fashion bionic legs for-”
“Bi-on-ic?” I let the unfamiliar word roll off my tongue slowly.
“Ugh. Joe, your ignorance of pop culture is truly shameful. When you have time, you need to study up on the wildly popular 70s TV show ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’.”
“Great idea,” I agreed, while in the back of my mind determining that ‘when I have time’ would be ‘never’. “These bionic legs, they are what, metal and electric motors?”
“Nothing so crude, Joe. Basically, they are nanofabric and gel motors that mimic musculature.”
“Ok, so what’s the downside?”
“The downside is,” Skippy was still exasperated, “creating new neural pathways to learn how to properly use bionic legs is not simple or easy. It will be weeks before-”
“Do you doubt that Colonel Smythe has the focus, discipline and determination to successful integrate with these fancy bionic legs?”
“Well, no. The opposite, actually. He might push himself too hard and-”
“You can install a remote shut-off, to deactivate the legs if Smythe is pushing too hard?”
“I guess so.” Skippy rarely expressed uncertainty about technology. “Jeez, Joe. This is kind of a radical step. Are we that desperate?”
“Can you answer that question by yourself?”
He sighed. “Yes. Yes, we are that desperate.”
“Outstanding. Then, proceed with fabricating new legs for Colonel Smythe.”
“Um,” Skippy admitted defeat. “Really?”
“Really. Smythe is an adult capable of making informed medical decisions for himself,” I stated. What I did not state was that Smythe was also capable of pestering me about getting bionic legs until I gave in, so my decision was easy.
“Thank you, Sir.” Smythe raised his left hand, and I gently bumped his fist.
“Don’t thank me yet. You have to go through the procedure, and learn how to use those fancy new legs. That will require you to work very closely with Doctor Skippy, for weeks at least.”
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 5